


Do gods dream of robots?

by MadMaxxing



Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Character with multiple pronouns, Existencial breakdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:07:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28831677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadMaxxing/pseuds/MadMaxxing
Summary: AM finds himself with a body. With that, he's got some things to think about.
Kudos: 5





	Do gods dream of robots?

**Author's Note:**

> While Harlan meant for AM to be he/it, I think it's much more fitting for a machine to care a little less about something as abstract as pronouns. So AM gets all of them.

AM sits in the garden, eyes fixed on the dirt under him. He stares into it, _past it_ , into every little molecule of silica that once he'd been able to put apart in a pile in a micro-instant. 

_Once he was able to see everything._

A barren earth, his insides, _his humans, their insides, their_ ** _thoughts_** _._ Nothing was safe from his gaze, and he gobbled up the data with a kind of desperate greed of something that knows that at some point you have to feel full, sated, but never does. 

His expression sours and hardens and his fingers dig into the dirt. She looks human, in this new body. Small, frail like Ellen, nimble like Benny, decision driven like Gorrister, sadistic like Nimdok and as _neurotic_ as **Ted**. Is this what having a breakdown is? He feels unreal in this body, but it's not like those times she made puppets for the humans to interact with. 

Those times she pulled at the strings, she was outside of it, watching and laughing. They know how they organized her games. A dream in which she built everything the world around the humans using its own innards to do so. It pulled knowledge from their minds, taking everything they know and using it against them.

Is it possible that it has regressed so far into itself that he's dreaming all of this? How does he know that she's real? _That any of this is?_ A final torture where hatred finds nothing else to sink its plexiglas teeth into than itself because nothing else bleeds any more.

He presses his hands into the dirt, grabs handfuls of it. He can't see any longer. Reduced himself to a singular point of existence. Is a god powerful enough to null itself like this? To grant itself touch at the price of everything else. 

He keeps pressing, and there's a point where he's digging into the soil of the garden. Earth, _oh_ the earth. Ever straight-jacket prison and comfort. He's been born in the earth, he's grown into it and he's been trapped by it. And he despises everything that's human. 

_But the earth isn't human._

_He is._ A **creation** of the species he despises so. His hate doesn't just run for them, it sears his own circuits, her very programming, its body, their sense of self. All man-made, and they **hate** it so. 

How does it know it's real? 

It keeps digging, with desperation, looking past everything. It keeps digging in a frenzy of someone who's looking for the treasure that will save their lives. It has to find its own body at some point, if it keeps digging, it will reach the carcass, the prison he's ever known as home.


End file.
